Journal browse list?

["David Brennan" <dbrennan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Good afternoon-

Thought I'd share this with the group and get some feedback. 

One of our "things to work on" has been an online journal holdings list. We already have an index to search journal titles, but not a simple alphabetical list, which is useful to browse when working with a long bibliography (instead of typing each title into the search form)

Two solutions seemed possible: a "featured list" selection or a manually generated list to a static web page

When I investigated the "featured list" option, I wasn't too happy with it. According to the manual, [since we already used the featured list for new books] if you have more than one featured list, selecting "Featured List" takes you to an intervening page where the user must select which list they want to view. Is there any way to rig it so that each featured list could be accessed directly, via link or button? So a button for "New Books" goes to new books, and button for "Journal Holdings" goes there?

I then looked into to the generated web page. I initially wanted a list with title and holdings information in a table. I ran into a problem with holdings, since some of our holdings statements are quite long, so decided to make a list where each title is linked directly to the record in the system. Selecting a title will then bring up that journal's record directly. This way the only time the page needs to be updated is when a title is added or deleted; holdings stays with the record.  Below are the steps we took to generate the page:

1. create a list in Millennium:

BIBLIOGRAPHIC  MARC Tag 229  greater than or equal to  "a"    AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC  Content1  not equal to  "c"
Sort by 229
[we needed to pull out the catalogs, annuals and other things that aren't really "journals", so that's why the Content1 <> c part]

2. export records:
Record number
229|a
229|b

3. open in Excel
- make sure all record numbers are in the same column
- strip check digit from record numbers (Tools|Text to Columns|Delimited) remove last digit
- insert column with space between 229|a and 229|b
- combine these three columns (i.e. =a2&b2&c2)
- copy combined title information and fixed record number columns to clipboard, paste special|values into new worksheet 
- Save.

4. Open saved file. Manipulate columns to appear as follows:

Column 1		<a href="http://your_url_here/record=
Column 2		record number
Column 3		">
Column 4		Title information (229|a 229|b)
Column 5		</a>
Column 6		<BR>
Column 7		=A2&B2&C2&D2&E2&F2	

Column 7 makes a complete URL: <a href="http://your_url_here/record=b1234567";>229|a 229|b</a><BR>

5. Copy this column to the clipboard and past it into wordpad, notepad, or html editor to complete the web page layout.


Anyone have any other ideas on this? It does work and is fairly low maintenance, but I'd have preferred to use the featured list function. I don't plan on regenerating the list more than annually. You can see how it works here: http://www.barbourlibrary.org/journal_holdings.htm

Cheers,

David

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David Brennan, MLS
Electronic Services Librarian
Clifford E. Barbour Library
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
616 N. Highland Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15206
412-441-3304 x2256
412-362-2329 (FAX)
dbrennan@xxxxxxxxxx
http://www.barbourlibrary.org
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